Difference Between Samsung Galaxy S3 and LG Optimus 4X HD

Samsung Galaxy S3 vs LG Optimus 4X HD | Full Specs Compared
 

Somebody asked me whether to go for a Samsung product or a LG product. I asked him about his intention for a smartphone, and he said it’d be used for normal usage along with some business uses. I told him that I can’t really give a preference for him between those two brands; since both are well established brands and the only differentiating factor would be your brand loyalty. The way I see it, you can find a smartphone of similar caliber in both accounts and decide between them with your preference. I’m a Samsung guy, but that doesn’t mean I recommended Samsung to him. However, I explained some reasons behind choosing Samsung over LG and the main reason was the diversity of the products Samsung has. In any case, his preference was for LG, and he bought a LG. That was a close call, but as you can see, LG and Samsung have been competitors as long as I’ve known them to exist.

When you come to the Android market, this rivalry is even more emphasized. The advantage of this never ending competition is the products and services offered by both of these companies gets enhanced and developed which is highly beneficial to the customers. Recently Samsung uncovered the successor of their signature product, Samsung Galaxy S III. That has been a much anticipated smartphone and a look at the surface deemed promising. We thought of comparing it with one of the main competitions it would have on the market, LG Optimus 4X HD. Both are bound to be released at the same time frame and are expected to be sold virally. Performance factor in both smartphones are very impressive so we will look into the entire feature sets of the phones in order to identify what’s better.

Samsung Galaxy S3 (Galaxy S III)

After a long wait, initial impressions of Galaxy S III haven’t disappointed us at all. The much anticipated smartphone comes in two color combinations, Pebble Blue and Marble White. The cover is made with a glossy plastic that Samsung called as Hyperglaze, and I have to tell you, it feels so good in your hands. It retains a striking similarity to Galaxy Nexus rather than Galaxy S II having curvier edges and no hump at the back. It is 136.6 x 70.6mm in dimensions and has a thickness of 8.6mm with a weight of 133g. As you can see, Samsung has managed to produce this monster of a smartphone with a very reasonable size and weight. It comes with a 4.8 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen that features a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels at a pixel density of 306ppi. There’s apparently, no surprise here, but Samsung has incorporated PenTile matrix instead of using RGB matrix for their touchscreen. The image reproduction quality of the screen is beyond expectation, and the reflex of the screen is also rather low.

The power of any smartphone lies in its processor, and Samsung Galaxy S III comes with a 32nm 1.4GHz Quad Core Cortex A9 processor on top of Samsung Exynos chipset as predicted. It also accompanies this with 1GB of RAM and Android OS v4.0.4 IceCreamSandwich. Needless to say, this is a very solid combination of specs. The initial benchmarks of this device suggest that it’s going to top the market in every aspect possible. A significant performance boost in the Graphics Processing Unit is also ensured by the Mali 400MP GPU. It comes with 16 / 32 and 64GB storage variations with the option of using a microSD card to expand the storage up to 64GB. This versatility has landed Samsung Galaxy S III with a huge advantage because that was one of the prominent disadvantages in Galaxy Nexus. As predicted, the network connectivity is reinforced with 4G LTE connectivity that varies regionally. Galaxy S III also has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity and the built in DLNA ensure that you can share your multimedia contents in your big screen easily. S III can also act as a Wi-Fi hotspot enabling you to share the monster 4G connection with your less fortunate friends. The camera seems to be the same available in Galaxy S II, which is 8MP camera with autofocus and LED flash. Samsung has incorporated simultaneous HD video and image recording to this beast along with geo tagging, touch focus, face detection and image & video stabilization. The video recording is at 1080p @ 30 frames per second while having the ability to video conference using the front facing camera of 1.9MP. Besides these conventional features, there are a whole lot of usability features that we can eagerly await.

Samsung is boasting a direct competitor of iOS Siri, the popular Personal Assistant that accepts voice commands named S Voice. The model exhibited didn’t have a sound model of this new addition, but Samsung guaranteed that it would be there when the smartphone is released. The strength of S Voice is the ability to recognize languages other than English, like Italian, German, French and Korean. There are a lot of gestures that can land you in different applications, as well. For instance, if you tap and hold the screen while you rotate the phone, you can go directly in to the camera mode. S III will also call whoever the contact you were browsing when you raise the handset to your ear, which is a good usability aspect. Samsung Smart Stay is designed to identify whether you’re using the phone and switch the screen off if you’re not. It uses the front camera with facial detection in order to achieve this task. Similarly, Smart Alert feature will make your smartphone vibrate when you pick it up if you have any missed calls of other notifications. Finally, Pop Up Play is a feature that would best explain the performance boost S III has. Now you can work with any application you like and have a video playing on top of that application on its own window. The window size can be adjusted while the feature worked flawlessly with the tests we ran.

A smartphone of this caliber needs a lot of juice, and that is provided by the 2100mAh batter resting at the back of this handset. It also has a barometer and a TV out while you have to be careful about the SIM because S III only supports the use of micro SIM cards.

LG Optimus 4X HD

Like all high end smartphones, LG Optimus 4X HD has a glamorous look. It doesn’t have curved edges like the usual design, but that really doesn’t make the phone uncomfortable to hold either. We don’t know the exact dimensions of this handset, but it’s scored at 8.9mm thickness. It has 4.7 inches HD-IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels at a pixel density of 312ppi. The screen is fortified with Corning Gorilla Glass and the display panel is top notch. You can use it in the broad daylight without any problem and the clarity of the images and texts would be intact. The high pixel density means the texts on your screen would be crisp like the text on a printed paper. It is said to have 16B of internal storage with the option to expand using a microSD card.

The LG Optimus 4X HD is powered by 1.5GHz Cortex A9 quad core processor on top of Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset and ULP GeForce GPU with 1GB of RAM. The operating system is Android v4.0 IceCreamSandwich and is optimized to utilize the multiple cores of the processor in an energy efficient manner. This hardware setup is the best one can find in the mobile market with the quad core processor and Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset. With this smartphone in your hand, the caliber of multitasking possible is unlimited. The optics is scored at the usual 8MP bar including autofocus and LED flash along with Geo tagging. It can also capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second. The 1.3MP front camera is useful for the purpose of video conferencing. LG Optimus 4X HD stays connected using HSDPA and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n ensures continuous connectivity. It can also share the internet connection by hosting a wi-fi hotspot and the ability to stream rich media content to your Smart TV wirelessly using DLNA comes in handy when you want to entertain someone. It has a relatively large battery rated at 2150mAh, and we can expect a usage of 8-9 hours or more from that.

Conclusion

As I started the discussion, I said I’m a Samsung guy, but that isn’t going to cloud the judgment here for I’ll break down the features separately and discuss them. We don’t have records of the benchmarking tests performed on either of these handsets, so we can’t guarantee the below for sure, but as far as I can say, the performance rendered by both would be the same. Both have Quad Core processors, and the LG Optimus has a processor that is tweaked slightly higher at 1.5GHz. The chipsets used are highly competitive and lies in the same range. The internal storage and the outlook, as well as, the display panels are almost identical. In terms of dimensions, LG Optimus 4X HD is slightly thicker. Other than these, there are two significant differences between these. Samsung Galaxy S III has 4G LTE connectivity as well as the ability to capture 1080p HD videos and images simultaneously which is lacking in LG Optimus 4X HD. The former feature would be important if you’re constantly connected to internet and need a very fast connection at your fingertips. The latter wouldn’t make much of a difference if you’re a light user. So again, it all comes down to preference of the brands. We at DB can recommend both of these smartphones and let you have your pick.